Main Takeaways: - How to clear the technical bar in an interview - Once you are a PM, how to build credibility with the Engineering team without a technical background - How to solve product problems without a technical background

1. Be a Google PM Without Tech Background
by Google Product Leader
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5. By Abhishek Kaushik
Product Manager, Google
Building a PM career without a technical background
You don’t need a CS degree to be a successful
PM

6. Proprietary + Confidential
A good PM should
have a technical
background be fairly
technical
“
”

7. Introduction
● MS in Chemistry
● Started career as a data analyst
● Joined Google as an operations analyst
● Moved to Technical Program Management
● Moved to Product Management
No CS background and the only real “technical” skill was of data analysis

8. ● Myth: You should have done coding in past / professional life
● Myth: You should have a CS / Electrical / Math background
● Fact: You should have a good understanding of web technologies
● Fact: You should be able to participate in technical discussions with
Engineering / XFN
Bottom line: Can you effectively use technology as a tool to
solve difficult user problems?
What are the “technical skills” from a PM career standpoint

9. ● PMs must understand enough of technology to know what can be done and in what timeframe.
● PMs should be able to describe in reasonable detail the technical design of the system and the tradeoffs involved.
● PMs should be able to participate meaningfully in a high-level technical discussion with the engineers on the team.
● PMs should be able to query or analyze data for making product decisions.
How technical does a PM needs to be?

10. Part - I: Being technical before PM interviews
What you need to do to ace the interviews

11. 1 General knowledge phase: Teach yourself technical concepts of how web
technologies work and some fundamentals of scalable systems (what is TCP/IP, DNS,
LRU Cache, Distributed systems, Progressive web app, compression, SSL)
But there is a lot of general knowledge to acquire!
2 Communicate: Explain the concepts to someone, make sure you can properly speak
the tech language
3 Prepare (over-prepare): Practice how the above learning can help build scalable
web systems (aka system design interview - e.g., design backend for uber)
How to prepare for a technical interview?

12. 1. Should be able to have basic but broad understanding of software and technology
a. The basics of how the internet works (DNS, HTTP, Routing, etc.)
b. How might a web system be structured on a global scale
c. How large scale software development works (What role PMs play on the team, what challenges
do engineers face?)
2. How does Amazon.com work?
3. What is LRU caching? What is multi-threading? What is websocket?
4. How can you make web browsing faster?
More sample questions

13. Part - II: Being technical after PM interviews
What technical skills do you need on the job?

14. Why do you need to be technical in a PM role
General Tech heavy product Consumer product
● Earn respect from Eng / XFN
● Show empathy with Eng
● Lead incidents
● Source moonshot ideas and
evaluate them
● Customer interaction, exec
pitch
● Tech leader for XFN team
● Not very important in sourcing
ideas

15. How to acquire on the job technical skills
Earn respect
● Understand software development life cycle, engineering practices of the company
● Understand technical infrastructure of the product and the domain
● Eventually, you will be judged and respected based on product skills (user needs, market understanding, design
thinking, consensus building, leadership, salesmanship)
Leadership
● Technical language fluency by practicing key concepts
● Be good with data analysis (data crunching, SQL, analysis on spreadsheet)
● It is hard to become a tech generalist - be an expert in specific areas

16. ● CS degree / coding experience is a (bit) of an overkill for a PM
● A good PM is perhaps about 80% product skills and 20% tech skills - industry is recognizing that
● While you definitely need technical skills - most of them can be learnt in a few months (and not in
few years)
● You don’t need to LeetCode to become a PM :)
Source: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis non erat sem
Wrap up - “I don’t have a CS degree, what next!”

17. www.productschool.com
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